[Samuel De loenen]

To my knowledge you have to add fades manually at the ends of clips in FCP7. You can do it pretty fast though with shortcut keys.
I’ve heard good things about FCPX. Simple, fast (makes use of multicore, background rendering), subsequent updates/patches have adressed many issues.

[Samuel De loenen]

I was wondering as well wether Thunderbolt holds any advantage over eSata.

According to this article it does. They used 6 and 4 drive Raid 0 systems.
https://www.macworld.com/article/1161122/thunderboltvsesata.html

I however am looking at buying a G-Raid, which contains 2x 7200 rpm drives in Raid 0. There’s a price difference between the thunderbolt version and the esata/firewire/usb one.

[Samuel De loenen]

Some interesting posts here.

I’ve been fiddling around with Avid MC and FCP for small private assignments in a non-professional context, trying to get the basics down.

Started with Avid (got it cheap), since this was recommended to me as industry standard, but had some gripes with that. The AMA system and the architecture of the whole NLE seemed to be quite complex and eating away a lot of processing power. I’m on a mac mini with footage on a usb connected external drive. Once, I fired up Avid with the drive still turned off which got me into serious troubles that eventually a friend of mine who works in the industry managed to guide me out of. Also the way you need to import images and the steps necessary to adjust them felt cumbersome, I got annoyed with dialog boxes appearing after certain actions, adding titles in marquee felt overly complex compared to FCP, basically the whole interface felt more sluggish and cumbersome in comparison to FCP. Also migrating a project from express to MC you need to follow a whole series of exact steps and even deleting a project is complex; if you don’t follow guidelines and just try intuitively you’ll end up deleting the project but not all of the media files. Again something that seems to be organized more simply in FCP, with the capture scratch and other folders.

I actually decided to give FCP a shot because the people I’d meet who were doing something with video, were all working with it, so I felt isolated and got the impression that Avid probably is used mainly by big industry (TV, film) and people who have worked in the industry for a longer period of time, while FCP is newer and more for small companies, freelancers, hobbyists, artists etc. (though I saw a list of Hollywood films that have been edited in FCP a while back).So I gave it a shot and liked the interface a lot better (the way the bin/sequence window can be organized for example), but didn’t like the fact that it needed more rendering in the timeline, especially with any text you add on to your video track. There’s also some good instructional dvds and books (Larry Jordan) that you can easily find on the internet, to get up to speed with this NLE fast.

Now what I read in this thread about Sony Vegas being able to handle many different formats, I find quite interesting. With so many codecs and formats out there, it seems quite nice just to be able to drop it into your timeline, not worry about it and let your NLE do the work. FCP7 is indeed quite limited in the types of media it accepts, but then again compressor works great and apparently you can create a virtual cluster of your processing cores (if you’re on a multi core machine) to speed up the transcoding process (haven’t sat down to figure this out and implement it yet, but I stumbled onto it on the internet). Also with audio, you can decide not to transcode it and render it in the timeline instead, since that doesn’t take much time. Still, going through compressor is an extra step and worry and requires a more systematic approach.

I’m also a bit curious about Edius 6. I was at a small exhibition for industry ppl a while ago and it was the only NLE present there and being promoted. Apparently its architecture is designed to take advantage of multiple cores and therefore performs very well with HD footage (here’s a video of an fcp-edius comparison, handling multiple tracks of HD footage: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mcrbHB3q0DI), and for that it’s getting increasingly popular, hence the sales rep of the store that organized the exhibition. From what I’ve read FCP7 doesn’t take advantage of multiple cores. Since Edius runs on Win7, I told the sales rep about the troubles I had with WinXP when I was still running Avid Express and how mac had made my life a lot easier, but he said that since windows 7 has been pretty stable and that he actually gets mac people in his store with more bizarre problems than the windows ones, so go figure.

A windows user myself, I went through the effort of switching to mac which cost me some time and sweat. But I managed to adapt to it and found out about totalfinder, which addressed my frustrations with finder. I’m actually hesitant now to go back to PC, since I had codec/driver problems with that and many other unpleasant surprises that kept popping up. With mac it’s all been working out of the box, no viruses, worries, etc. Still don’t like the fact that if I double click on window it actually disappears instead blows up full screen, but hell, you can’t have it all.

I think for now I will stick to FCP 7 since I’m starting to get this program down and don’t feel like switching yet again. One of the nice things about FCP is that the suite is quite complete. You can color correct, edit sound, transcode, create dvds (dvd studio pro is not that hard to work with and gives you lots of options). Now I heard that FCX is getting bad reviews (though it remains to be seen how the FCX story evolves) and FCP7 is in a dead end street. Panasonic’s cameras for example now record in ACVHD, which needs to be converted to prores under FCP7 and who knows if native support will ever come if Apple’s focus is on X now. Some people are saying it’ll all go back to avid, but the sales rep at the exhibition said that we are definitely now in a situation of multiple NLE’s co-existing and that this will most likely continue in the future.

One more thing regarding Avid and FCP just to make things clear: those are just my personal experiences and opinions. In no way have i gone through the trouble of mastering these programs the way industry professionals do, nor do I have the same needs. I guess what’s important for me is that an NLE feels intuitive, easy to learn and keeps things simple without getting shallow. It’s not about having the supposedly best, most expensive or recognized piece of software. it’s all about what your needs are and which tool fits them best. Cause that’s all NLE’s are really, just a tool to make something you want/need to make. And sometimes it’s best to keep things simple.

Greets
Sam

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